Clearing out a gmail account

If your gmail account gets filled up and you need more space, you could pay for an upgraded gmail account with more storage. Or you can clear out space. For clearing out space, there are two approaches:

The surgical option: Delete large emails to free up space. The search arguments “has:attachment” and “larger:30mb” (or “larger:10mb”, or whatever size) are useful.

The nuclear option: Download all of your gmail and then delete old emails indiscriminately. This page tells you how. Once you start the process, it can take many hours for the download archive to be constructed. Do something else– they’ll email you when it’s done. Then download the files. To view the archived mail, an application like mboxview works.